(pages 48-71)

There’s a description of a sixteen-year-old pop star who is totally not Britney Spears, what gave you that idea?  She denies being a sex object, and “you” laugh, because she wears short skirts and therefore only exists to titillate middle-aged men.  Stands to reason.

“You” reflect on “your” midlife crisis, and how bungee-jumping didn’t make you feel alive but sleeping with an underage prostitute did.  You know, it’s getting kind of tiresome, typing “you” over and over.  If the book doesn’t give this second-person character a name soon, I might have to give him one myself.  I’m thinking something along the lines of “Hubert Pubert.”

We then get another quote from The Iliad, with Helen describing herself as a “nasty bitch.”  Cheer up, Helen- you’re not half as nasty as old Hubert here.

Hubert takes a younger woman he plans to sleep with (is there any other kind?) into the Versace Boutique to buy her stuff.  The manager won’t let them in while they’re eating pretzels, so Hubert bribes and bullies him into doing so.  Hubert inwardly laughs at the manager for allowing him such a victory, but is then insulted that the girl finds it funny.  Hubert doesn’t have much of a sense of humour, I’ve found.  Then there’s a quote from General Lee on the nature of war.  Because acting like an entitled dweeb in a clothes shop is exactly the same as leading men into battle.  At least Hubert wasn’t doing it to defend his right to keep slaves, I guess.

Back to the first-person narrator, who also doesn’t have a name yet, remembering himself and his wife being scared by a mouse on their wedding night.  His wife asks him to deal with it, so he smashes its head in with a table leg.  Again, also not the same thing as going into battle.  Maybe if the mouse was armed with a bazooka.

Another quote from The Iliad, with Aganemnon resolving to give Briseis back to Achilles, and then we have Hubert deciding not to discuss his business practices with his girlfriends, so as not to sully their innocent minds.  One of these girlfriends was an underage prostitute.  I’m never going to get tired of pointing that out.

There’s a bunch of statistics regarding the sex industry, concluding, “All told, the American male is clearly not getting what he wants at home.”  Not least because what he wants is teenage girls to fawn over him, and, in real life, they’re annoyingly reluctant to do so.

At work, Hubert wears a bracelet his girlfriend bought him, and is embarrassed when his friends notice.  Hubert imagines that the teenage girls he letches over are just as interested in him, and that their frustrated, cheated-on mothers are angrier with them than they are with him.  The first-person narrator is angry that his wife taught him a trick for using vending machines, and now he can’t ever forget about her because it will mean forgetting how vending machines work.  This is the kind of thing they’re comparing to a ten-year battle against Troy, by the way.

There’s a list of words to do with love and addiction, thus comparing the two.  This is a very original thought.

There is then a strange section that states that people who grow up in poverty and whose sisters become disabled because of this are luckier than people whose children don’t end up at the right university, because they’ve found out earlier on that the world is a harsh and cruel place.  Also, making lots of money and only dating women who are too young to see what an idiot you are is exactly the same thing as “lead(ing) armies into Gaul.”  Just watch out for those bazooka-wielding mice, I guess.

There’s a section that begins:  “Have you ever seen a domesticated dog with its first bone?”  I’m not sure why the narrator felt he had to specify “domesticated.”  Maybe he was worried that the readers wouldn’t know what a dog was.

Hubert is admiring his expensive new car, congratulating himself for not being one of those stupid people who refers to cars as “she.”  There are problems with work, but, on the bright side, he seems to have a wife now.  She doesn’t nag him like his friends’ stupid, awful wives, but he’s still unsatisfied.  Probably because she’s not fourteen.

Hubert drives away from his house to a nearby bar, where a group of college girls ask him about his career and hang on his every word.  They are impressed by his house and his car.  One of the girls takes him back to her room, and is much better in bed than his wife.  Geez, and people called Twilight wish-fulfilment…

(pages 21-32)

In the next section, “you” (possibly a different “you”) go out into the country to buy some land.  “You” gleefully fantasise about shooting intruders.  “You” then go out to dinner, and get annoyed because the waitress doesn’t fawn over “you” in the manner to which “you” have become accustomed.  Then a local alligator-farmer* comes along and kicks “you” out of your booth, thus establishing himself as my favourite character so far.  And the waitress actually does talk to him, completing “your” well-deserved humiliation.

There is then a section about animals with hooks on their penises.  Apparently, this is quite inconvenient.

The next section switches to the first person, which is handy because it means I don’t have to keep typing “you” anymore.  The narrator and his girlfriend are in France.  There’s a mention of their college years, which means that the two of them are about the same age, which probably means that she’s about to get cheated on with a fourteen-year-old.  There’s a weird bit where the girlfriend tries to get the narrator to drink champagne off her breasts, but then she pours it wrong and it ends up going all over the bed.  The narrator asks her to marry him, but then ignores her in favour of a report from work on the plane back.  Like I said, she’s gonna get cheated on.  Poor girl.

There is then another quote from The Iliad.  Like the last one, it’s about Achilles.  I’d have assumed that this was a reference to Achilles’ heel, and that the male characters’ lust for young women is supposed to be their one tragic weakness, but I’m not sure the story really supports that.  I mean, the guy from the last entry found that sleeping with underage prostitutes actually helped his career, so he’s not much of a cautionary tale.

Now we’re back to “you” again.  “You” wake up frightened in the night, after dreams of losing all your money and “fighting with a woman as old as you are about whether or not you can afford to see a movie.”  “As old as you are”!  The horror!

Anyway, “you” are in bed with a woman whose name “you” can’t remember.  The point is that she’s younger than you.  Oh, and she “find(s) you fascinating,” because that idea didn’t make me feel queasy enough in the introduction.  “You” angst about the fact that “you” have just slept with a young, pretty woman who clearly likes you.  “You” are such a tortured soul.  Luckily, in the morning, “you” see her walk naked to the shower, notice that she doesn’t have any “sagging flesh,” and immediately cheer up.

We get a strange witticism about running (apparently you shouldn’t talk and run at the same time), and then we’re back to “you.”  “You” are letting “your” new girlfriend take “you” to clubs, bars and cafes that “you” inwardly sneer at.  We are told that “you” love “your” younger girlfriend despite her terrible taste in date locations because “you” appreciate the fact that she isn’t jaded and bitter yet, but I think “you” just like having someone around who “you” can look down your nose at.

There’s a quote about Agamemnon taking the slave-girl Briseis away from Achilles.  The odd thing is, Briseis wasn’t hanging around with either Achilles or Agamemnon because she “found them fascinating,” but because she was, you know, a slave.  She didn’t have any choice.  This seems like an important distinction.

There’s another queasy bit about older men smiling patronisingly at their younger girlfriends’ ignorance.  Then we go back to first-person, and we’re talking about a divorce.  Surprise.

Guess why they’re getting divorced.  Go on, guess.  You’ll never get it in a million years.  (Hey, his wife deserved it, because she had small boobs and asked him annoying questions.  What was he supposed to do?)

Then the narrator describes teenage girls’ bodies as “freshly baked, ready to eat,” and I think I’m done with this for now.

(pages 5-21)

First of all, this whole book is in second-person.  This is probably a bad move, because it leads to the reader saying unhelpful things like, “Wait a minute- I don’t have a penis, and even if I did, I certainly wouldn’t use it to do that!”  This takes them out of the story.

This is the first paragraph of the book:

How did they get so young?  These girls that only yesterday seemed so far away from us, these girls that seemed like another country.  Tell me, when did they become children?

Basically, a very pretentious version of, “That’s what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age.”  The narrator goes on to tell us that the joy of them being “children” is that they don’t make emotional demands on you like those lousy rotten fully-grown women do.  Then there’s this:

And when did they cease to ignore us?  When did they begin to fawn over us?  When did we begin to fascinate them?  With our money and companies and perceived security.

At the risk of repeating myself, I have never once met a teenage girl who was attracted to men with “money and companies and perceived security.”  Decent abs, guitar-playing abilities and maybe a cool car, yes.  A position on the board of a major corporation, no.

In the next section, “you” meet a girl who “you” used to be involved with.  This girl has now grown too old to take “you” seriously.  This is clearly a great tragedy, and she should stop and re-examine her life.

Moving on, “you” are now a businessman who flies into Korea.  “You” inspect a ship, sack a worker and feel guilty about it.  “Your” girlfriend calls, and tries to comfort “you” with squicky baby-talk.  “You” are unmoved:

Mommies are for sick little boys.  You aren’t sick, you aren’t a little boy, you don’t need sympathy.  There is nothing tender loving care could do for you right now, right now there is nothing even your real mother could do to make you feel better.  She wouldn’t, couldn’t, understand what it was like any more than your girlfriend.

Nope, but an underage prostitute might!

That’s the gist of the rest of this section, to be honest- “you” sleep with an underage prostitute, comparing her favourably to “your” actual girlfriend all the while.  The next day, “your” boss, who gave you the number of the brothel in the first place, slaps “you” on the back and congratulates you.  The section then ends with a quotation from The Iliad, because this book is classy, dammit.

The above is the back-cover blurb of Girls by Nic Kelman.  No, sorry- girls.  No, sorry- girls: a paean.  We must be accurate.

Note how, in the description, we are given three examples of older men who sleep with women who are too young for them (we all know that “a young woman whose true age he never learns” is a euphemism for “a girl who was probably underage,” right?).  Note how we aren’t told how the girls themselves feel about any of this.  Note how said girls are explicitly described as prizes and possessions.  Note how all the men are described entirely in terms of their financial success.  Note how we’re encouraged to compare this book to Ancient Greek literature purely on the grounds that it’s about dirty old men trying to get their end away.

Note also how two of the review quotes are from James Frey and J.T. LeRoy, two well-known biographical authors who were later found to be lying their heads off.  That has nothing to do with anything else- I just find it funny.

I was a teenage girl myself when this book came out, and it annoyed me so much that I bought a £1:99 copy from The Works in order to horrify my friends (none of whom, I assure you, had any interest in sleeping with their fathers’ grubby mates, even if they were wealthy CEOs.)  These days, I’m 29, and it still annoys me.  So I’m going to spend this summer reviewing it.  I’ll try to post twice a week, talking about twenty pages at a time, give or take.

And, after that, I’ll probably chop it to bits and turn it into origami swans.  Or maybe I’ll cover it with amusing graffiti and post photos.  It depends what kind of mood I’m in.